Month: May 2014

I have this PCB designed to control four flame effects. Instead of running it on the Arduino, I’m doing an FFT on a laptop and trying to control the solenoid drivers through a USB parallel port adapter on the laptop.

The /dev/usb/lp0 device entry appears to be created by the usblp module. I have a suspicion that what’s going on here is that the device entry created by usblp isn’t claimable the way one created by ppdev would be.

Using rmmod to get rid of usblp doesn’t work, it just gets restarted when I re-insert the USB connector for the adapter. Blacklisting it in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf just means that the /dev entry doesn’t get created, not that ppdev takes over.

Most reports online also indicate that USB parallel ports don’t really act like parallel ports, but only work for connecting parallel printers. Since I’ve already wasted enough time on this, it’s time to go with plan B. I’m going to fully populate the board, so that it has an Arduino on it, and then interface to that using serial commands and possibly Processing or OpenFrameworks.